Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong (2010), The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money (New York: Basic Books: 9780465018765).

When you have the money--and "you" are a big, economically and culturally vital nation--you get more than just a higher standard of living for your citizens. You get power and influence, and a much-enhanced ability to act out. When the money drains out, you can maintain the edge in living standards of your citizens for a considerable time (as long as others are willing to hold your growing debts and pile interest payments on top). But you lose power, especially the power to ignore others, quite quickly--though, hopefully, in quiet, nonconfrontational ways. An you lose influence--the ability to have your wishes, ideas, and folkways willingly accepted, eagerly copied, and absorbed into daily life by others. As with good parenting, you hope that by the time this happens those ideas and ways have been so thoroughly integrated that they have become part of what is normal and regular abroad as well as at home; sometimes, of course, they don't. In either case, the end is inevitable: you must become, recognize that you have become, and act like a normal country. For America, this will be a shock: American has not been a normal country for a long, long time.

Back Matter for Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong (2010), "The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money" (New York: Basic Books)

James Fallows:The End of Influence is timely, convincing, practical-minded, and very well written> If you want a way to understand our economic predicament and the real choices ahead, this is an excellent place to start.

Romano Prodi: I started reading this book and could not stop until I arrived at the last sentence. Really splendid: rigorous, scientifically perfect, and politically accurate.

Robert Reich: In this splendid little book, Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong real one big truth: There's no returning to the neoliberal order of deregulation, privatization, free markets, and free trade that captured the minds and hearts of American policymakers over the last three decades. America is broke, and must now face a much messier world in which governments--especially those controlling lots of savings--are intent on playing a different game.